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one day, sometime in the late spring of 2013, an interesting machine was spotted in a first floor building 3 corridor.

is that.. a CNC mill?

furthermore, is that.. cruft?

An email of the following form was sent to the occupant of the room next to where the machine sat on its pallet:

Professor,

Is the CNC mill currently outside 3-158 is being removed? I know of a student shop on campus which would be quite happy to make good use of it.

Thank you,

To which there was a reply:

Which student shop?

Are you available sometime today to swing by my office Rm 3-154 to discuss the machining center?

Turns out, Prof. Ian Hunter’s lab had replaced it with a newer machine, and they were looking for a place to put it.

Email wankery ensued. Topics included: “does it work?”, and “where will it go?”

>>does it work?

It was confirmed with a grad student in prof. Hunter’s lab that the machine “should work,” and that it had been turned on in the past year. Good enough.

>>where will it go?

MITERS has lots of space, right?

maybe not.

In spite of this, the overwhelming consensus was that it should come to MITERS.

It didn’t take long for MITERSfolk to descend upon the prize. A pallet jack was borrowed from the donor lab, and Tyler pulled the half ton machine from building 3, down a freight elevator, through the basement, to the Stata loading dock where a Uhaul awaited.

There, Bayley crufted some keyboards while Tyler, Dane, and Peter lined up the lift gate with the truck.

meanwhile, a group of people led by Mars took apart MITERS and played stuff-tetris until a space was made.

There’s no lift gate at N52, but things worked out just fine in the end.

With the semester almost ending, I’m glad that my second DRSS-Tesla Coil is finally done! DRSSTC 2 began almost a year ago with the goal of making my first tesla coil using brick-style IGBTs.

DRSSTC makes 4 feet of sparks look easy, in MITERS

First Version

The project began when I bought two Toshiba IGBT half-bridge modules on ebay, good for 150A 600V. The original plan was to build a compact and powerful DRSSTC running this full bridge, with about a foot long secondary. The coil also uses a revised version of Steve Ward’s UD2 as the driver. After many months of work, I finally got everything put together. Unfortunately, initial tests were worrying, and I soon found out that one of my IGBTs was half-dead. With the lack of time and money, I wasn’t able to continue with these bricks.

Revision 2

I managed to get hold of a CM200DU-24F 200A 1200V IGBT and decided to make a half-bridge coil instead. The CM200 bricks are larger, so I wasn’t able to fit a fullbridge inside the box I had already made. Finally, this worked perfectly and everything came together.